First Blu-Ray movies announced News

Oh!

The Fifth Element, House of Flying Daggers and Desperado should be purchases for me.
Mmmm... true hi-definition movies at last with decent sound!

DVD is soooooo shite.

What format do the studios keep the movies in?

Presumably they're butchered something awful to fit them onto a regular DVD.

hmm yet to be convinced by blu-ray and hd-dvd, i cant see your average joe wanting to spend 400 quid on a fancy new box and new discs to play films he already owns.

Great, so they are promoting it by using ancient films, some of them where not even worth watching the first time. All here who have BR players raise your hand.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to release more than one good film ;0

I still think that Hi-def is the emperors clothing.

I was in curry's over christmas, they had 2 hi-def sets displaying hi-def film demos to show off the technology. I'm still buggered if i can REALLY see the difference when it's all moving, etc.

Sure, when you pause it, or on a static screen. It's REALLY noticable. But when it's moving (which is what you expect a film to do) - couldnt tell.

And those that claim they can tell are probably the same people who claim they can tell the difference between 50 & 60 hz.

I can UNDERSTAND in america them wanting to go hi-def, as their picture qaulity is pants. But over here, im not convinced in the slightest.

still doubt that the public will shine to blu-ray having spent all these years getting there dvd collection together. Did some work in uni on this most people didnt have a clue what blu-ray was and were shocked to find that they will have to start there collections all over again plus blu-ray is also a way in which sony can effectively own the future of home entertainment because by in large looking at hddvd the support compared to blu-ray is terrible

Oooohh exciting!!!!!


NOT!


Now you can own the DVD, UMD and Bluray version of Sipderman!!!

thats why i put my movies on a memory stick :D

"Will Blu-Ray players play DVDs too?"

The option is quite possible for BR reader makers, but at the expense of dual laser read heads. It's the same for HD-DVD, though, really.

bring back these bad boys http://www.zaldiva.com/store/product986.html

i'm more than happy with the quality DVD offers.

So are most of us. This new generation of media seems increasingly irrelevant. How long did we get along with video tapes for? 15, 20 years? DVDs started to get popular in 99/00 and now 5 years later we've got a new format on the way that'll require new hardware. The jump from DVD to blu-ray/HD is far less significant than that of VHS to DVD. We've already got special features and menus, I fail to see what the new discs can offer that DVD doesn't have already, aside from HD (which requires a new TV that the majority of us don't own.)
And then there's the HD-DVD/blu-ray situation...

Considering most of Europe is without a high definition TV service and will be for years it seems like a giant waste of time trying to push Blu-ray or HD-DVD to people who largely aren't going to care. If anything most people are going to look at their giant shelf of DVDs and be royally pissed off.

"Now you can own the DVD, UMD and Bluray version of Sipderman!!!"

Wow, is that anything like Spiderman perchance?

Couldn't give a toss about BluRay movies, just games. Hopefully we'll be seeing some of those announced before long.

the future of hddvd or blu ray movies will depend on the support of the porn industry if they they embrace it we will have to but if they dont we wont they were ones that decided the fate of dvd

What a shitty lineup. It's either terrible recent films that nobody wants to watch, or oldies that won't make that much of a difference on this new format thanks to the old technology. I can't waith to watch "The Guns of Navarone" in high-definition glory! WOW!

And if we learned anything from the launch of DVD players... these first movie releases will have crappy transfers and quality.

blue ray and hd-dvd are coming too early for movies, people are still discovering dvd

and the majority of HDTV's sold upto 8 months ago are not compatible and will display the movies in 480p

A tv that is 'HDREADY' ie has an HDMI or DVI (with HDCP encryption) is required to view these movies in high def

Just out of interest, how many of these films would benefit from HD? Remember that the first generation of DVDs had absolutely appalling transfers, and in some cases looked no better than VHS transfers. Aren't older movies filmed in such a way that it would in effect be upscaled for HD anyway?

So, you're basically saying that we should just tell Sony Europe to piss off and buy our PS3 in America or Japan, is that it? Well big surprise, and what I was gonna do anyway, heh.

Oooo what an exciting lineup of movies... not!

And seeing as the first HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players will cost around $1,000 (~£600) what's the betting that the movies themselves cost upwards of £30 or more?

I agree with PearOfAnguish that hi-def movies have arrived too soon and that the leap from hi-def DVD over standard ones isn't as pronounced as the leap from VHS to DVD since we can already watch a digital picture with digital audio. Better to just buy an upscaling DVD player like I have and continue to watch DVDs in 720p or 1080i until you can be sure which of the two new formats has a long-term future.

At the moment I'm in no rush to buy Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movies as I'm delighted with current DVDs via HDMI on my Samsung DVD player. I really don't think that Sony will have the same success with Blu-Ray on the PS3 as they did DVD on the PS2, mainly because in order to watch Blu-Ray movies you MUST own an expensive HDTV otherwise there'd be no point in buying the expensive movies.

Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Lionsgate have also announced titles!

Paramount (first ten are launch titles):

Four Brothers
Sahara
Aeon Flux
Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow
The Italian Job
Tomb Raider
U2: Rattle and Hum
Sleepy Hollow
We Were Soldiers
Manchurian Candidate
Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?nd
mViewId=news_view&newsId=20060104005375&newsLang=en

20th Century Fox (20 "first wave" titles):
Fantastic Four
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Behind Enemy Lines
Kiss Of The Dragon
Ice Age
+ 15 more

http://www.ccnmatthews.com/news/releasesfr/show.jsp?action=s
howRelease&searchText=false&showText=all&actionFor=574032

Lionsgate (their first 10 titles):

Lord of War
The Punisher
The Devil's Rejects
Saw
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Reservoir Dogs
Total Recall
Dune
Rambo: First Blood
See No Evil

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=
/www/story/01-04-2006/0004242114&EDATE=

So that's 60 titles announced sofar - with Disney, Warner, New Line etc. still to announce!

For those sceptical of how big a difference it is - I think you should wait to see it with your own eyes rather than speculating. Initial reports from tradeshows past, where Blu-ray was demoed with 720p material, were full of open-jawed praise. And these movies are coming at 1080p - twice the resolution of 720p still! On a HDTV the difference will be huge, no doubt about it.

Yeah, the original masters for movies recorded on film are not a limiting factor here at all. There is no concept of discrete resolution with those movies, it's a continuous signal. Masters are the ultimate quality, for a particular movie you won't ever get better. DVD and Blu-ray take digital transfers of these movies. Blu-ray, with nearly 7 times the resolution will get a lot closer to master quality than DVD (and indeed, I can already see some of the studios touting it as offering "master quality").

And it don't just expect movies, either, since hit TV series will be making the transition too (please Uncle Sony oh please we've nearly worn out our Babylon 5 DVDs).

I doubt B5 was produced on anything higher than standard definition. At least you could get a whole season on a single disc I suppose.

But at the end of the day, you'd still be watching Babylon 5 :(

What format do the studios keep the movies in?

Presumably they're butchered something awful to fit them onto a regular DVD.

Until a few years back, they kept copies of the original negatives somewhere safe and had standard def digital masters for broadcast, DVD, Laserdisc, and everything else.

I think Ridley Scott talks about Fox doing new digital transfers at 4K (4000 px wide) on the newest Alien DVD. 2K masters is enough for the highest format today, 4K masters are even future compatible once XHDTV comes out in ten years. :)

"Like DVDs, Blu-Ray discs will be region-encoded - but there's a twist. There will only be three regions this time round: Region 1 (the Americas and East Asia, excluding China but including Japan), Region 2 (Europe and Africa) and Region 3 (Russia, China and Others)"

So Australia and NZ are in Region 3?

Fuck off Sony - always imposing new formats on us like that bloody UMD fiasco.

I saw a demo recently in a store and was amazed by the quality.

It was on a 42" LCD screen, which helps.
But many stores just dont have the hardware to showcase it properly.

"Fuck off Sony - always imposing new formats on us..."

If you think Sony are the only company that does that, think again.

Cheers Valli.

There's no way I'm 'upgrading' my DVD collection this soon. I dread to think how much it would cost. As long as the player is backwards compatible, i'll stick with DVD thanks.

So - if you're serious about gaming and you're European - screw Sony Europe and import from America or Japan is the message here once again?

"And those that claim they can tell are probably the same people who claim they can tell the difference between 50 & 60 hz."

If there was no actual difference between 50 and 60hz then so many people wouldn't complain about it. I for one can immediately tell if a game is locked to framerate and running at 50 and for me it significantly detracts from the gaming experience on most titles. I've even tested it, we had the same game running side by side on 2 consoles, in this case was a PS2 RPG. We put the player character in the same area and then had him run in a straight line from one end of the area to the other at exactly the same time. On the Ps2 that was running at 50hz, it took a full 5 seconds longer to get to the other side of the area than it did on the same game in exact same conditions running at 60hz.

To say that there is no noticeable difference between normal and Hi-Def video is just as laughable, why don't you load up a PC game, set it to 640x480, play for a bit, then run it at 1280x720 (some PC games support this res, PoP Two thrones for example) and then tell me if it doesn't look any better....

apart from being used as the ps3 game format (which i have no-objection to) - will blu-ray dvds be what betamax was to VHS i wonder?

it does seem like the DVD format has been given a short shelf life (even tho im being purely speculative atm), and as other posters here have already started, will the general public be ready for a new media system?

i for one, doubt it, and i can't afford to keep updating my film collections every 5 years either :)

I have a 1080p monitor, and 1080p clips are available for download. If you have a good full HD screen or projector, crt, lcd, plasma or anything else it will be worth it. But for most a good DVD upscaling chip will do.

The interesting thing would be to combine blu-ray and good dvd upscaling chip in the same player. That way you can enjoy your DVDs in the best possible way, and also have next generation 1080p option for all the new blu-ray (or HD-DVD) movies you get.

I will probably only buy blu-ray versions of the top 5 movies i already own, and it would depend how much better the transfer is, and how much extra they fill the discs with.

What... no Matrix?

+1 PearOf Anguish

This new generation of media comes way too fast. The difference in pricing will be huge and the visible quality difference almost unoticeable. Maybe Microsoft was smart this time by sticking to the simple and costless DVD format for 5 more years.

It makes me think of the CD Audio. Nobody cares in buying a SACD equipment (except a few hi-fi geeks) because people already have 300 CDs at home and won't notice any difference in sound quality on their 200€ stereo.

Who fucking cares?

No one with any sense will buy a BluRay until there are plenty of titles, otherwise whats the point?!

"Boss we have *no* PS3 info to share at CES"
"Whaaaat? Why not?"
"Well *cough* because we don't actually have a machine yet"
"But... we are launching in 3 months!"
"Err..."
"Announce some Bluray movies instead!"
"YES boss!! Great idea!"

So what are these going to be? 720p? 1080i? And how many of these are going just be upscaled versions?

*hughhh spit* And given most of these of these were probably filmed at 24fps, even at 1080p WHY THE F*** DO WE NEED A NEW DISK FORMAT? Most HD TS's will fit on a DVD (9) even, using H.264 Id expect a lot of films to fit on a standard DVD (yes even at 1080p).

Seriously, Why TF do we need Blu-Ray? A video player with upgradable codec support would see to make more sense...oh wait a sec. Stupid me, I was looking at it from the perspective of the consumer. I should have remembered that the purpose of blu-ray is actually to get far more restictive DRM out there so that people wouldnt be able to do things like make backup copies or skip adverts.....

Personally I think i'll wait till next year and see how HVD (800GB per disk with a promise of 3.6TB in 2009) does over the next few years...oh and stick with my freevo box.... :)

"And those that claim they can tell are probably the same people who claim they can tell the difference between 50 & 60 hz"

Maybe, but please don't tell me you can't do so. You needn't go any further than VF4:Evo. Play it for about half an hour on 60Hz then try out 50Hz. If nothing else, just about every combo you thought you knew won't work as it should.

Ofcourse it's not too soon, it's about 20 years since the first HD crt came out! But the move from DVD > HD* will take a long time. And now there are just videophiles that will buy it (And PS3 users?). Its not just a new format IMHO, it's a next step tech-wise....but it wont explode. I for one will continue to buy dvds.

I think Sony adopting Blu-Ray for the PS3 so soon could be a costly mistake.

It strikes me that the target audience for the PlayStation brand and, thus, the PS3 aren't the sort of people who are particularly interested in hi-def movies anyway or more likely don't own or have no intention of buying an HDTV, they just want to play the latest Metal Gear Solid or Grand Theft Auto title. Maybe I'm stereotyping but doesn't it strike anyone else as odd that Sony are suddenly aiming their new machine, not at the casual-end of the market, but the elite end, the person that has money to spend on expensive HDTVs and Blu-Ray movies that are needed to make the most of the PS3?

And surely any diehard movie collector isn't going to fork out for a games console when a dedicated Blu-Ray player will give better playback (remember how awful the PS2's DVD playback was? It didn't even support RGB for crying out loud!!!)?

I reckon Blu-Ray/HD-DVD are being launched at least five years too early and Microsoft have made the right choice by not including HD-DVD in the 360. In five years time, if HD movies have taken off then they can include it in the Xbox 720 and we'll be better informed as to which format to invest in so as to avoid buying into one that goes that way of Betamax!

I've seen 720p hi-def movie clips on my Xbox 360 and they do look great but they don't look amazingly superior to upscaled standard DVDs from normal viewing distances, just slightly better. Maybe from six inches away you can appreciate the differences in detail but personally I'm more than happy with upscaled DVD and it cost me just £90.

Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, as far as I'm concerned, can wait...

"What... no Matrix?"

Warner have not announced their titles yet. They will in the next day or so, though there's no guarantee the Matrix will be among the first.

"The interesting thing would be to combine blu-ray and good dvd upscaling chip in the same player. That way you can enjoy your DVDs in the best possible way, and also have next generation 1080p option for all the new blu-ray (or HD-DVD) movies you get."

This is one nice thing about Blu-ray as far as easing the transition from DVD to Blu-ray. I believe it's part of the Blu-ray specification that all Blu-ray players will also upconvert DVDs to high def. The argument is often put: "they expect me to buy all my movies again?!?" but that just doesn't make sense. It's not like VHS to DVD which were completely incompatible. Indeed, your DVDs will look better than ever on a Blu-ray player. So keep your DVDs, start buying Blu-ray (if its priced similarly), and selectively update your old movies if you wish.

"and Blu-Ray movies that are needed to make the most of the PS3?"

PS3 is primarily a games player. Blu-ray movies are one element of its offering.

"And surely any diehard movie collector isn't going to fork out for a games console when a dedicated Blu-Ray player will give better playback (remember how awful the PS2's DVD playback was? It didn't even support RGB for crying out loud!!!)?"

Many of the issues that gave rise to differences in quality in DVD playback between different players aren't really there with Blu-ray. They all support Digital-out etc. PS3's Blu-ray drive will be no different than any other early Blu-ray drive, except it won't record to discs.

"I reckon Blu-Ray/HD-DVD are being launched at least five years too early and Microsoft have made the right choice by not including HD-DVD in the 360. In five years time, if HD movies have taken off then they can include it in the Xbox 720 and we'll be better informed as to which format to invest in so as to avoid buying into one that goes that way of Betamax!"

You should feel very safe buying Bluray. The only major studio not to support it is Universal, and they're expected to announce support sooner rather than later. Blu-ray is the defacto HD movie standard now.

"I've seen 720p hi-def movie clips on my Xbox 360 and they do look great but they don't look amazingly superior to upscaled standard DVDs from normal viewing distances, just slightly better."

Compare them to regular DVD. Also, Blu-ray movies are 1080p, twice the resolution of 720p. I'd also wonder how those 720p clips from Live are encoded - I doubt they were encoding for quality, rather size (and thus speed of download). Technically the resolution jump from DVD to Blu-ray (7-8x) is nearly twice that which existed between VHS and DVD (4x).

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28691

Interesting little snippet there. They damn well better use the same size cases.

I own a Samsung HDTV (lucky me) and I tried to view some HD trailers on it from my PC. Sure it looks great, very detailed, as long as I stay close enough to the TV set.
When I go back in my sofa, the difference is not so amazing. You can still say that it's HD, of course, it's better, but the difference is not as big as it was between VHS and DVD.

Maybe the point is to get your sofa closer to the TV to really enjoy HD.


PS : I've got an excellent view.

Hi CrumbledPaper,

How are things going at Sony ?

"Maybe the point is to get your sofa closer to the TV to really enjoy HD. "

Or..get a bigger screen. Part of the role of HD content is to facilitate the trend of larger and larger screens.

I've a 90" projector screen at home, and trust me, no matter how far away I sit, you can see the difference between regular DVD and an upconverted DVD for example, not to mention native HD content. Regular DVD often looks pretty bad, actually..a larger screen certainly highlights its shortcomings.

"How are things going at Sony ?"

I'm sure they're just toasty.

I'm a home theatre enthusiast. I've been waiting for HD movies for 2 years now. Forgive me if I'm excited :p

Getting my sofa closer to the TV is less expansive than a bigger screen ! :-)

Well, you're a home theater enthusiast and then I perfectly understand your point. Useless to say that the mass market isn't, and that's why I hardly see 10th of millions of people rushing on HDTVs and BR disc players next year.
According to me, HD won't get mass market before another few years. And that might cost a lot to Sony on the PS3 side of things.

/Sets up PlayAfrica